Revised plan approved by NCSSM Board of Trustees, December 2025.
NCSSM 2030: Advancing academic excellence for all NC
With the monumental opening of the new Morganton campus in the summer of 2022, North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics greatly expanded our institutional scope, presence, and positive impact within North Carolina. Diligently executing our previous strategic plans got the institution to this point. Now, as one school with two campuses and many programs, this new Strategic Plan guides NCSSM to sustainably optimize our capabilities, practices and resources. It leverages the many insights from students, parents, alumni, employees, boards, friends and collaborators – and the experience of building a campus from scratch – to catalyze a vision for extensive renovations on the century-old Durham campus. It redoubles our efforts to create efficient and sustainable operations involving our entire team and to care holistically for team members and students. As we build our partnerships strategically to magnify our impact on STEM education for students in all 100 North Carolina counties and beyond, we emphasize broad access to education and the active participation of alumni as keys to meeting our mission.
Strategic Plan 2024–2030
Mission
The mission of the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, an innovative and collaborative leader in secondary STEM education, is to advance our state, nation, and world by creating opportunities for broad access to exemplary public education that fosters, challenges, inspires, and empowers students and communities to design their future.
Objectives
Goals that NCSSM will achieve through the Strategic Plan
Objective 1
NCSSM students will engage in transformative opportunities for self-discovery, where they can explore their passions, question, learn, and create; empowering them to design their future and positively impact others.
Objective 2
NCSSM will be a community where all members including students, employees, and alumni flourish.
Objective 3
NCSSM will collaboratively develop and scale the impact of its educational resources with partners across the state to accelerate innovation and create opportunities for North Carolinians to thrive in the global environment.
We will expand transformative programs and collaborative partnerships for underserved students and communities.
We will foster holistic development to proactively meet the success and wellness needs of all students.
We will recognize the value of each employee and prioritize employee engagement, development, wellness, and empowerment.
We will reinforce and develop resource streams to ensure NCSSM’s future and mission.
We will advance innovative processes, data usage, and infrastructure across programs that scale to need, ensure access, enhance security, guarantee privacy, and facilitate improved governance in order to promote effective and efficient work.
We will create transformational experiences, available to the NCSSM community, by leveraging institutional flexibility to extend our interdisciplinary and experiential learning opportunities in and beyond the classroom.
We will establish a comprehensive artificial intelligence framework that is aligned with our institutional values, ensuring ethical stewardship of artificial intelligence, thereby positioning NCSSM as a leader in AI use in a K-12 institution while strengthening critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
Learn more about the Office of Institutional Effectiveness
The Office of Institutional Effectiveness provides leadership for the institutional strategic planning process as well as work with individual divisions and departments by request.
For more information, or if you have questions about the Strategic Plan, please contact:
Dennis Gilfillan
Interim Executive Director of Institutional Effectiveness & Chief Research Officer